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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27219016">Where Are All the Batteries?</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenelopeAbigail/pseuds/PenelopeAbigail'>PenelopeAbigail</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Whumptober 2020 [27]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Spider-Man (Video Game 2018), Spider-Man - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Extreme Weather, Gen, Ok Who Had Natural Disasters On Their 2020 Bingo Card, Power Outage, Whump, Whumptober 2020, shakes fist in anger at weathermen, untrustworthy weathermen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 20:01:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,894</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27219016</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenelopeAbigail/pseuds/PenelopeAbigail</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>What's a bug-man to a hurricane? </p><p>Spider-Man is having trouble sticking to things because of the water and wind and weather, and the hill he's slipping down isn't helping.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Whumptober 2020 [27]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1955698</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Whumptober 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Where Are All the Batteries?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Day 27!</p><p>This one was fun to write! Not as much whump as some of the others, but there are lightning and water, and those two don't mix well.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">The weathermen said the hurricane would take only four days to pass.</p><p class="p1">The first day and a half would be storms signaling its approach, then only a bit more than half a day to clear the city, and then another day and a half to finish out the trailing storms.</p><p class="p1">It was day seven without power, and Peter had never seen Manhattan in such chaos.</p><p class="p1">It’s been raining non-stop for eight days, and some people were talking crazy, like how the island was going to drift away into the ocean and become the Atlantic’s Hawaii.</p><p class="p1">Fools.</p><p class="p1">Manhattan wouldn’t float away. It’d sink.</p><p class="p1">Peter knew nothing about geology, that wasn’t his area of expertise. He could only laugh.</p><p class="p1">Laugh in bitterness. He couldn’t charge his phone or gadgets, and yeah, Pete knew very well how to build a battery, had built many before, but he didn’t have the time!</p><p class="p1">No power across the entire area meant that security systems were down, stores were bring robbed for generators, and criminals could sneak around much easier.</p><p class="p1">Pete had his work cut out for him.</p><p class="p1">He’d already built two generators in the last week, but Aunt May needed one more than he did, and how could he possibly leave MJ without power?</p><p class="p1">He hadn’t built one for himself yet—well, technically both of those had been for him, but his heart was big, and he couldn’t bear to see someone he loved in need when he could help.</p><p class="p1">No gadgets, and no HUD. It was fine. He’d be fine.</p><p class="p1">It was just raining buckets at midnight—<em>was it midnight? He wasn’t sure, but the moon was high in the sky and—oh gosh, moons don’t work the same way suns do—</em>and the wind was blowing approximately twenty-five to thirty miles per hour, and for the first time in his spidey-ventures, he was having a hard time sticking to things. Maybe he shouldn’t be so high up…</p><p class="p1">He didn’t have animal-style night vision by any means—<em>boy, that’d have been a cool power to have gotten from the spider—</em>but his enhanced senses allowed him to see <em>better</em> than others in the dark. Yet, amidst this hurricane and subsequent power outage, he was lost on the streets of Manhattan.</p><p class="p1">If he was still <em>in</em> Manhattan.</p><p class="p1">And he wasn’t even on the streets! He was between streets trying to hold onto the side of a building, but the wind was gusting like another hurricane was coming through.</p><p class="p1">You know that feeling when you’re super-gluing something back together and you end up gluing your fingers together instead, and they’re stuck together so tightly that it <em>hurts like a mother</em> getting them apart? That’s a rough idea of how his stickiness worked, except that it was voluntary and painless.</p><p class="p1">It was like an extra set of muscles, just a part of him somehow.</p><p class="p1">The winds were picking up, and he was on <em>the wall</em>, and he thought perhaps, it’d be a good idea to climb down and stick to the ground instead, where he not only had his stickiness to keep him rooted but gravity as well.</p><p class="p1">He thought about just jumping down, but he couldn’t clearly see the ground where he’d be landing very well, and—<em>his spidey-sense buzzed, danger was coming—but from </em>where? He couldn’t really see any—</p><p class="p1">A trash bin came from nowhere and slammed into him, and granted, while that stung, he was much stronger than it so it didn’t really impact him, except that there was a rat inside that scuttled on and over him and chomped on his forearm.</p><p class="p1">Startled, he yelped and swatted at it with both hands, knocking it away and dislodging himself from the wall.</p><p class="p1">He had only been about two stories up—there was an incline, so the bin hadn’t needed to try very hard to gain altitude—but he was completely disoriented. The wind was loud, the rain was loud, the thunder was loud. Everything was completely dark except the lightning that danced across the sky, and while he could see exceptionally well through the lenses of his mask, water rolled down them like a windshield.</p><p class="p1">He’d only been about two stories up, but he hadn’t been able to brace himself very well from the impact on the concrete. For sure, something was definitely bruised, but he was able to pick himself up just fine. The headlights that were suddenly in his face were surprising tho.</p><p class="p1">He dodged effortlessly, but no one should be driving in this storm right now, so he webbed the back of the car to pull it to a stop. The weather was progressing too quickly, and everybody needed to be safe in their homes, and <em>not driving</em>.</p><p class="p1">The car came to a stop, and the driver’s window rolled down, and a man stuck his mustached face out the window to scream, “I knew you were stupid, <em>wall-crawler</em>, but not even <em>I</em> thought you were this stupid! Stay out of the road!”</p><p class="p1">Pete stood up and dropped the webbing as the window rolled back up.</p><p class="p1">Freaking J. Jonah Jameson.</p><p class="p1">Why was he even out this late?</p><p class="p1">The car shifted gears and went back to cruising down the dangerous yet abandoned street.</p><p class="p1">Pete watched only a few seconds as he drove away, but even that was enough of a glimpse to tell that Jameson couldn’t see well. The car was going slow, swerving between lanes, and Pete decided he needed to follow to make sure JJ got home all right—<em>yeah, yeah, he shouldn’t have, but JJ was in danger, and he couldn’t just let him get hurt.</em></p><p class="p1">In any way, Pete had a suspicion that JJ lived near him, and following the lights home would be easier than trying to figure out which street he was on with every turn.</p><p class="p1">The rain battered down, soaking his suit, and making his socks squelch. The worst feeling, but he could do nothing about it. Besides, he’d been soaked for hours now, and he figured JJ had a harder time seeing through the rain than he did.</p><p class="p1">They hadn’t made it a block before the wind picked up again, and Pete was having a hard time not slipping and falling down the hill, super-strength be damned. It was amazing how JJ had managed to get up there at all.</p><p class="p1">He had to have missed something on the news about this weather. There was no way a dying tail-end of a hurricane could produce storms like this. There had to be something else going on!</p><p class="p1">His spidey-sense warned him of another something flying his way, falling down the hill and he dodged to the side, gripping the building to avoid slipping, and when he turned back, JJ was out of his sight—<em>and his spidey-sense was going off again—</em>lightning cracked, and he could see a car slipping backward down the hill, running away to crash into some building, and he couldn’t let that happen!</p><p class="p1">He jumped out in front of it, catching it easily, but slipping a little himself, then all of himself, then he was sliding down the hill with the car, and he moved his feet, scrambled, and groped for purchase through the rapid waters, not finding any. He glanced behind him just in time to see the brick building coming up quickly. He managed to throw his hands up to protect his head in time, but then he was on the other side of the wall.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Ow, okay, that stung a little.</em>
</p><p class="p1">For the first time that night, he was finally out of the rain, laying atop the brick rubble, but not escaping the water because it trickled in and within seconds he was laying in a shallow pond. He was grateful that there was only one brick under his back, and that’d definitely bruise, but he was fine—coughing on the dust that quickly turned to mud from the moisture but coughing nonetheless.</p><p class="p1">Absently, he wondered what JJ would have to say about this night, but then the car door opened and JJ stepped out, newspaper over his head to protect from the rain, and he quickly dodged his way around the bricks and into the building too, sticking close to the wall—<em>trying to keep his distance from his hated nemesis, perhaps, or trying to find the lights? Joke’s on you, JJ, the power’s out!</em></p><p class="p1">“Damn you, Spider-Man! This is your fault! Why’d you have to go and—“</p><p class="p1">And lightning flashed overhead, lighting up the area and the ceiling of the building they were in—<em>oh, now that he could see it, they were in a gym, a boxing club by the way it smelled—</em>and thunder drowned out the rest of JJ’s words, as did the electricity that arced through him, recharging his tech, and frying his nerves.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Great, he was laying in a pool of water, and water was highly conductive…</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>How’d…</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>How…</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>How’d the…</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>The lightning strike </em>him<em> tho…</em></p><p class="p1">
  <em>What?</em>
</p><p class="p1">He hadn’t realized he’d been blinking between thoughts until he noticed that the time in the corner of his HUD was changing, and his shoulders were being held, and his body was being dragged.</p><p class="p1">And he’d been mumbling. Yay.</p><p class="p1">His muscles were slightly twitching, but he was fine, and he wanted to say so, but he must’ve bitten his tongue or something because it was all stuffy in his mouth—<em>oh wait, no, that was his mask. Part of his mask was in his mouth?</em></p><p class="p1">He reached up to grab it, and the person dragging him dropped him.</p><p class="p1">He pulled the mask back down and sat up, dazed, shook his head to clear the muddiness away.</p><p class="p1">He heard, “Oh, you’re fine! Of course, you’re fine! You’re just being stubborn and difficult, like a child, like a petulant child throwing a fit. What? Are you <em>mad</em> at me? Are you—“</p><p class="p1">Oh yeah, JJ was here. He remembered. He must’ve gotten stuck by that lightning, but why had his mask been pulled back?</p><p class="p1">“JJ,” he interrupted, “JJ! What happened? What’d you do to me?”</p><p class="p1">Did JJ take the opportunity to peek under the mask? Did he see Peter’s face and realize who he was?</p><p class="p1">“CPR, and yes, I’m certified, thank-you very much, and yes, I hated it much, <em>much</em> more than you did, I’m sure.”</p><p class="p1">
  <em>CPR? Dang, okay. Thanks, JJ.</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Who knew he was capable of saving Spider-Man?</em>
</p><p class="p1">He was still talking and Pete interrupted again, “Thanks, JJ,” and he put a hand on the older man’s shoulder, which was immediately brushed off with <em>Don’t touch me, you—</em>“Now you know what it’s like to save Spider-Man’s life.”</p><p class="p1">JJ froze with wide eyes, opened his mouth wide tor retort but Pete continued his charade by bowing low, sweeping the ground with an arm out, “I owe you everything, oh J. Jonah Jameson, my life, my will, my happiness, my children, my grandchildren, my house, my wife—“</p><p class="p1">“Shut up, you nincompoop, and do your job!”</p><p class="p1">Pete looked up. His job?</p><p class="p1">“Get me outa here, numbskull!”</p><p class="p1">He rolled his eyes and glanced out the window. Yup, still bad.</p><p class="p1">He hopped onto the side of the boxing ring and sat, dangling his legs over the side, “Doesn’t look like we’ll be able to until the storm dies down.” He turned to face JJ, sticking his thumb out toward the ring, “How about a friendly round?”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I don't actually know if it's possible to have two hurricanes so close, but the background for this fic (that didn't make it in) was that offshore, Storm and other X-Men were battling, and her powers are having catastrophic effects all up and down the east coast.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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